by Mark R.
Peattie, Ph.D.
Asia-Pacific Research Center
Stanford University

t is difficult to write about a legend. Write too richly
and you merely add to the fable; write too cynically and you will be
a mere debunker. It is even more difficult when the legend vanishes into
oblivion. Yet, in these pages on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, one
of America’s
most famous aviators, Richard Gillespie has not only avoided these treacherous
shoals, but has produced a narrative of epic scale, for he deals with the
greatest elements of tragedy: human error and its awesome consequences.
Of Earhart herself, Gillespie writes with admirable professional
detachment. “Earhart’s
piloting skills,” he tells us, “were average at best, but good
looks, genuine courage, a talent for writing, and her [husband] George Putnam’s
genius for promotion and media manipulation … made her one of America’s
most famous and admired women.”
Yet Earhart is not really Gillespie’s focus. Rather,
it is the harrowing account, as far as anyone can trace it, of her last flight
into the vast oblivion of the Pacific. In writing it, Ric Gillespie has
had to deal with three main challenges. First, that there is no incontrovertible
physical evidence as to her fate and what slender artifacts exist can at best
provide the stuff of intelligent conjecture. Second, the most abundant
evidence surrounding her disappearance is electronic – the records of
radio telephone and telegraph – which have been so voluminous, at times
so contradictory, and on occasion, so self-serving by those who sent them,
that the totality of their meaning and import have been not been clear until
now. Third, much heat but little light has been generated by the unfounded
assertions, the irrational theories, and the melodramatic perspectives of several
generations of amateur Earhart sleuth/enthusiasts who have had extreme opinions
but little fact to buttress them. Like curiosity seekers at a crime scene,
they have merely raised the level of confusion.
Ric Gillespie has brought to his task an array of
formidable qualifications to research and write what will probably the most
detailed and factual account of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance and the
massive and failed attempt to find her that we shall ever have. An experienced
general aviation pilot himself, a long-time risk management specialist and
aviation accident investigator, and a rigorous and determined researcher, Ric
has tracked down numerous leads in government, business, industry, and
aviation circles and has led a number of well conceived and organized search
expeditions to the Equator and the possible terminus of Earhart’s flight.
Over the decades, his search has involved him in investigations across a small
range of artifacts – buttons,
shoes, pieces of aluminum – in a painstaking study of radio logs, photographic
and cartographic data, and a growing familiarity with such esoterica as tidal
research and geomorphology. Where the trail has led to a dead end he has
had the courage and good sense to drop it and seek answers elsewhere. But
of all his tasks none has been more important and more challenging than the
collection, sorting out and reintegration of the mass of radio communications
surrounding the flight and the rescue effort into a comprehensible narrative,
an effort that has combined careful and comparative analysis with the sensitivities
of a skilled story teller to weave a compelling narrative.
And what a narrative it is. Like viewers at a rerun of
the old newsreel of the presidential motorcade entering Dallas on the morning
of November 22, 1963, we read with growing dread of the Earhart departure from
Lae, New Guinea, for her destination of Howland Island, a fly-speck on
the map of the Pacific, knowing that she and her navigator, Fred Noonan,
will never arrive. Thanks to Gillespie we also know how multiple were the
miscalculations (a number by Earhart herself), the misapprehensions, the
faulty equipment, and the faulty information that set her Lockheed Electra
on its fatal trajectory and crippled all attempts to guide
her to a safe landing. One reflects, too, on the fact that Earhart also was
six decades too early for access to a vital electronic system – global
positioning – that could have identified for herself and those
seeking her where she was in the vastness of the ocean. Throughout the story,
the hiss and crackle of empty air waves that mark the futile efforts
of Earhart and her would-be rescuers to communicate their locations to each
other are a threnody of encroaching disaster. From this account, too, it
is obvious, though not clearly stated, that the end of the crew of the Electra
must have been quite terrible – death by drowning in the wreckage
of a sinking aircraft or slow dehydration and death on the burning shores
of a remote and uninhabited atoll hundreds of miles off their original course.
On other stages and at other times, Ric Gillespie has proposed
a detailed and persuasive, if not conclusive explanation of what happened to
Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
I do not myself pretend to have strong views about her fate,
nor would I argue Gillespie has presented the final solution to the
Earhart mystery. Indeed, in these pages, Ric Gillespie himself has not made
this claim. He has, instead attempted the most complete and fact-based history
of the Earhart puzzle yet written. Brilliantly, he only hints at an
explanation for the Earhart enigma here on the book’s last
page, a suggestion left hauntingly in the air for us to ponder.
As an historian, I think I know good history when I read
it. By its display of technological expertise, by its careful weighing of complex
evidence, by its objectivity, and by its humanity, this is certainly first-rate
history.